22 April 2023 - Update - I have just moved to DigitalOcean App Platform, click to read.

It it time for a change. I had a great deal for a 5 year ultimate hosting plan with free SSL at GoDaddy.com.

However, now they want to charge me an arm and a leg to renew - GoDaddy provides a great price for new customers, but charge alot when you are locked in.

Also, the response time for all my websites hosted with GoDaddy had become disappointing - especially now that Solid State Disks (SSDs) are becoming more commonplace with hosting companies.

I have decided try out the do it yourself cloud hosting option provided by DigitalOcean.com partly to learn some new skills and also they have had some great reviews.

After a quick search online, I found a promotional code to get 2 months free hosting with DigitalOcean.com, so at least I could try before I buy.

As a member, DigitalOcean offer a referral scheme - please click my link if you’d like to try it for free:

$10 credit at Digital Ocean

DigitalOcean’s documentation and user forums are very active and I found it quite straight forward as a tech-savvy person to get a basic Ubuntu operating system installed on a droplet .

DigitalOcean is managed through a command line terminal, so if you are slightly allergic to the thought of typing commands, it’s probably not for you.

Serverpilot.io is a simple management system for DigitalOcean servers. Even their free plan takes care automatically of basic server security and PHP application management.

$10 credit at ServerPilot.io

I was also tempted with the CloudFlare.com service as it offers free SSL/ SDPY and static file cache - which is supposed to translate to faster and more Google friendly websites. Worth a try right?

In my next post, I’ll describe the steps to move the WordPress site to DigitalOcean using ServerPilot.io and then, hopefully CloudFlare!